Well if you have decided to take the plunge into Perl I commend you. So far my experience with Perl has been really great. I have already made very useful programs for both Windows and Linux. Coming from a web development background I like to think of Perl as the “PHP for operating systems”. If PHP is great for creating dynamic websites, Perl is great for manipulating anything to do with your operating system and applications. The best part is Perl has similar syntax.

Before you can create all this useful stuff you need to actually go out and get the Perl interpreter since it is a scripting language. Read more »

This article is here to help you get a jump start on using the UPS Shipping API. This article is part 1 of the series that will help you get all the required tools to get you up and running. Later the series will expand upon each service the API has to offer as well as go into detail on how to create your custom programs using various languages and show you examples with both PHP and Perl programming languages.

What is the UPS API?

 
The UPS API is a tool to allow you to communicate with the UPS servers using pretty much any programming language you want. This allows us to send our information, like addresses and weight and receive shipping rates and other information form UPS. UPS provides access to this API for free so developers can interact with their services to provide UPS information through their own custom apps. Whether it be through your web based ecommerce system to accurately determine shipping costs or display tracking information through your website. Read more »

Eric Wendelin over at eriwen.com was kind enough to let me post an article about Vim on his blog today. It is a nice guide to Vim for people that have never used Vim looking to add some productivity to their programing. If you have used Vim for years you might learn something as well.

While you are there check out some of his other articles. There are some great ones on grep, sed, awk, and lots more.

Vim is a beautiful tool

With my newly acquired Perl and regular expression skills I was trying to put them to the test and get a little practice. I asked a friend of mine if he had any regular expressions I should write. He first gave me an easy one. Replace ‘foo‘ with ‘bar‘ only when bar follows the word ‘blah‘. So after a minute or two I returned with a working regular expression.

Well that was easy…

Now for something a little trickier. He said, I want a regular expression that would print out words that land on every third letter ‘e‘ except if that word was ‘the‘. This doesn’t mean he wanted the third word that has the letter ‘e‘. Read more »

Google Chrome is the new browser that was just relased by Google in an attempt to capture the browser market to give them a significant advantage to their search/advertising business. With Chrome Google will be able to track what actions the browser takes to further narrow down pagerank of sites. Read more »